[In the following excerpt, Gillen explores themes of religious faith and ritual in the short story "The Unspoiled Reaction. "]

Mary McCarthy's "The Unspoiled Reaction" deals with the interaction between the "knowing" world of adults and the relatively unsophisticated and, to that extent, innocent world of children. Taken to attend a puppet show of Little Red Riding Hood one rainy Monday afternoon, the children find themselves warmly greeted by an entrepreneuse who asks each child's name. Separated from the parents and teachers so that the puppeteers may obtain an "unspoiled reaction" from the children, these youngsters are amazed when the puppet Sunny appears and greets each of them by name. Encouraged to participate, the boys and girls exchange repartees with Sunny and loudly take sides in the play, some choosing the part of the grandmother and others encouraging the wolf to make a good meal of her. Suddenly a child, who with his teacher and classmates from a progressive school had arrived late for the performance, reacts with the "natural" enthusiasm Sunny had encouraged, goes up on stage and attempts to touch Sunny. Sunny's falsetto voice becomes an agonized woman's scream: "Sunny doesn't like that." Startled by the reality and the aversion in the voice, the boy slips backward into the orchestra pit. After a few agonizing minutes when the boy is recovered unhurt and the parents wait to see if the show's illusion has been irremediably destroyed, Sunny reappears, seemingly as affable as ever—"Bygones were bygones, all was forgiven, . . ." Now, however, the children's reaction is no longer unspoiled or natural. They look to their parents, find the correct reaction as the more docile begin to imitate the adults who have "screwed their own faces into grimaces of pleasure." Soon the children are caught up in the play once again and all seems to go smoothly until after the final curtain when the same boy receives his teacher's permission to go backstage and handle the puppet. There he and the other children who follow him encounter the entrepreneuse, screaming now, no longer in Sunny's, but in her own voice: "Get out, get out of here . . . You dreadful, horrible children." The children run, and they and their guardians flee in shame and silence out into the rain.

As has been noted by several critics, Miss McCarthy's story touches then on several themes: the exploitation of the children by those who care nothing for them, the concurrence of the adults in this deception, the loss of innocence and the expulsion from childhood's paradise. A further ambiguity is added by the fact that the children's "unspoiled reaction" is not wholly innocent, that some, siding with the wolf, grow so unrestrained that the rational control of the adults is not wholly unadmirable and is perhaps necessary. Beyond these important themes, however, I would like to suggest that Miss McCarthy's story deals with the idea of theatre as ritual, with the lack of genuine ritual in the modern world, and the consequence of this lack on today's theatre. What the entrepreneuse desires or seems to desire from the children is their ritualistic participation in the play, the breaking down of the fourth wall of the theatre. In commenting on this active involvement, the narrator notes that "the reciprocity between player and audience, lost to us since the medieval mysteries, and mourned by every theoretician of the drama, was here recovered. . . ." The medieval mysteries referred to, of course, are those plays depicting events from the Bible which were originally performed as part of the ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass. The difference between such ritual and the play performed for the children by the puppets lies in the matter of belief. Noting the frank, often ribald and sometimes blasphemous language of players and audience alike, Parrott and Ball in their account of these mysteries write: "People then believed so implicitly in the Bible story that they were ready to allow themselves the frankest familiarity with Bible characters" (A Short View of Elizabethan Drama). What was enacted before them was the panorama of God's genuine interest in man, of man's creation, original sin, expulsion from Eden, and his reconciliation with God. By contrast there is no genuine adult belief in the sincerity of Sunny's friendliness or his interest in the children. When the entrepreneuse's smiling and tender greeting of each child seems to bring the parent within the circle of "the holy miracle of his child's identity," that lady feels obliged to nudge the parent and let him in on the utilitarian motive. In the auditorium, the nonbelieving adults must be separated from their credulous children so that their lack of belief will not be infectious. After her reference to the medieval mysteries, the narrator, continues ironically: "And what did it matter if the production was a mockery, a cartoon of the art of drama."

Several of Mary McCarthy's critical writings lend support, I believe, to this interpretation. In her description of St. Mark's in Venice Observed, Miss McCarthy suggests that the vivid colors in which hell is painted in the mosaic, the "Universal Judgment," imply that the Venetians took the idea of judgement and damnation as story rather than as fact. She contrasts this mosaic with the impression of solid belief one gets when one looks at the altar and continues: "Something of this obstinate faith survives in the redhaired boy who explains the mosaics. He heard me one afternoon explaining them myself to a friend, and it cannot have been professional rivalry that caused him to interrupt. 'After the Crucifixion,' I was saying, 'Christ is supposed to have gone to Limbo—.' 'Not "supposed": He did,' the boy cut in, peremptorily."

Similarly, in a review of three plays produced in the 1944 season, she complains that though each—Harvey, The Streets are Guarded, and A Bell for Adono—suggests a pattern of belief, external doubt and renewed faith, each play fails to stand up to intellectual analysis because, outside of the play, no one can believe in the validity of the objects of belief. She writes: "Now this is an old enough pattern of drama or fiction; it is, after all, the story of the New Testament. What is remarkable in these three plays is that the virtue resides, not in the object, but in the believer. It makes no difference, according to these authors, whether the belief is objectively a delusion." Somewhat sadly she continues:

The truth is (and the weakness of these plays demonstrates it) that the drama is incorrigibly concrete; it cannot, like the movies, deal in shadows, or in reverie, like the novel. It demands that its conflicts be settled; it cannot, by its very nature, dissolve them away, as the camera can. It is the only one of the arts whose medium is the living flesh, and this sets a certain limit on belief—one is always more conscious of what is excessive in a stage performance than one is of the same kind of thing in a movie or a novel. In fact the very plainness, conclusiveness and realism of the stage have unfitted it to deal with this period of irresolution, evasion and ambiguity (Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1962).

When we return to "The Unspoiled Reaction" with this distinction between genuine and spurious ritual in mind, we see that many events in the story parallel the ritual of the medieval mysteries. In the theatre lobby, there exists the initial friendliness between the entrepreneuse and the children, as there existed in Eden an initial friendliness between God and man. The adults, however, are "the snake in this paradise of innocence." Lacking faith, they see the badly lighted, damp, mostly empty theatre only as "this house of death." When the boy wanders onto the stage and attempts to touch Sunny, there is a breach between Sunny and the children as there was a breach between Adam and Eve and God. Retreating from Sunny, the boy stumbles and falls into a pit. Seemingly, too, there is redemption, for when Sunny returns, he is "cordial as ever. . . . Bygones were bygones, all was forgiven." After the play, however, the validity of this redemption is tested: "The drama was not quite over; a reconciliation must follow between the puppet and the child. . . ." Only then, in the curse of the old white-haired woman, "'You dreadful, horrible children,'" and her continued rage, is the spuriousness of the apparent reconciliation revealed, and the distinction between this and effective medieval rituals revealed. In these mysteries there was no fourth wall; the forgiveness was genuine because that which was enacted was, to player and audience alike, real.

Miss McCarthy seems to suggest, then, that the loss of faith has also meant the loss of affirmative ritualistic theatre. Incurably realistic, the theatre demands faith in the objects of belief it propounds. Lacking such belief itself, the modern adult world sees faith as suitable for children—fairy tales, Santa Claus, etc.—but, in the presence of other adults, especially is embarrassed and uneasy over the fraud. Nevertheless its continued, though somewhat uneasy, investing in childhood many of the values formerly associated with belief—innocence, forgiveness, kindness, and a certain nostalgia—suggests its own feelings of separation and desire for reconciliation, for genuine ritual. "In shame and silence, it [the audience] fled out into the rain, pursued by the sound of weeping which intermingled with the word child, as pronounced by the teacher in a tone of peculiar piety and reverence, her voice genuflecting to it as though to the Host" (final emphasis mine).